FC United of Manchester
FC United of Manchester
FC United of Manchester

FC United fundraising book

Volunteer board meeting summariser Jonathan Allsopp has put together a book which will shortly go on sale with all proceeds going to the club.

You can reserve your copy by sending an email to jonathan.allsopp@live.co.uk - each book will be £10, and these will be a limited run so don’t delay in claiming yours.

Jonathan has written extensively on FC United related matters over the last seven years on his ’nowtmuchtosay’ blog and, to assist the club’s finances in these football-less times, he’s put together a selection of these articles into a book which will shortly go on sale with every penny of the proceeds going to the club.

Jonathan explains more here:

There’s something grimly amusing about spending nearly forty three years of your life as an out-of-town football supporter, travelling up and down the country to watch your team home and away, spending thousands of pounds just getting to games never mind season tickets and the rest of it……only to find that when you do eventually up sticks and move two hundred miles to be closer to your football club that within weeks football has been cancelled and you’re spending every single flippin’ Saturday afternoon indoors. And your football club, like hundreds of others around the country, has lost all its main sources of income.

That’s why for the last few weeks I’ve been busy assembling a collection of some of my writing on FC United from the last few years into a book that will hopefully be available for sale by the end of May to raise some funds for the club.

Some of you will be aware that I’ve been writing about FC United related matters for several years now on my ’nowtmuchtosay’ blog and some of those pieces have also appeared in the matchday programme, on the ’A Fine Lung’ website and a few of the more recent ones were written for FC United’s ’Top of the World’ fanzine. In total there are nearly eighty FC-related pieces on the blog written since 2013 and I’ve whittled these down to thirty eight to put into the book (I’d like to think of it as a ‘best of’ selection) and have also tried to include introductions to each piece and explanatory notes so that it might also be of interest (and make sense) to other football fans who don’t follow FC United and even those who don’t like football at all.

Although it contains none of the investigatory zeal of Red Rebels, the meandering loveliness of An Undividable Glow or the erudite match analysis of Trips on Glue I’m hoping that it will nevertheless be a worthy addition to the FC United bookshelves.

The book weighs in at roughly 70,000 words which I think will equate to about 230 pages of a typical-ish paperback. The print costs are substantial but I’m intending to print 300 copies and sell them for a tenner each with all proceeds going to the club – I’m therefore hoping that we can raise £3,000 for the club.

So if you might be partial to parting with a tenner for some summertime football-related reading material then please send an email to jonathan.allsopp@live.co.uk and I’ll be in touch in due course with details of how to pay etc when I’ve got some physical copies to send out which will hopefully be before the end of May.